EASTCONN Tech Council Meeting Minutes from October 2, 2008

• **K-12 Online Conference** Amplifying Possibilities: October 15-19 and October 22-26 - FREE online professional development with both live and asynchronous events. Forty presentations will be posted to the conference blog for participants to download and view.
• Grant Writing That Gets Results - October 16, 2008 at EASTCONN in Hampton - Inexpensive all day workshop on learning the ins and outs of writing successful grants.

• If another company hosts your email, employers cannot check employees' email.
• If your district hosts your email, employers can check employees' email.

• By one computer and this interface box and card can run 6 computers off of it (2 cards) or 3 with 1 card. All that's needed is one good computer, the others are "dumb" terminals with keyboards, mice and displays. 25 foot ethernet cable limit.
• Bob (Woodstock) has had success with the system. Only can run one program to the other computers. Company is working on updating software. Rebooting each night helps empty the RAM. Woodstock has been working the problems out with the company. Wire spaghetti mess. Bob welcomes visitors.
• Rich (Weston) has had some success. If the "serving' computer crashes, the others crash as well. Video can be slow for video-intensive applications. RAM intensive as well so you might want to increase RAM. Dell USB keyboards didn't work, but most should. Their district plugged them in and used out of the box.
• Company has more options and developing new interfaces. There are a variety of options and settings to explore.

• Mansfield is going VMWare for virtualizing their servers.
• Clone servers for problem-solving.
• 15-20 servers on 2 boxes is the goal for the district.

• Building an install of the operating system for your computers that can fit on a CD or DVD.
• FREE - open source.
• Does not take the place of imaging the computer but useful for the price.

• Lynn did a presentation on the Discovery Network.
• She used Veodia and splitscreen.
• Kathy Schrock is having an open house on her island on October 20th.
• Our EASTCONN group needs to get together!
• Peggy Sheehy did a wonderful presentation for seventh grade on second life. (Steve saw her this summer and was very impressed.)

• Successfully used from Brooklyn to Chicago.
• Does not use a lot of bandwidth on 1-1 use.

• Mansfield's grant - contact people in different parts of the world using Web 2.0 tools.
• Live microblogging.
• As you watch a presentation, Cover It Live
• If you see someone blogging, others can ask to participate in the blog
• Lynn used blog.discoveryeducation.com/newyork/ scroll down for info the Sept. 26-27.

• Steve suggests we use social networking tools during CECA.
• Twittering, Cover It Live, wikis for notes, Plurk (probably locked by CEN).

• CEN can be frustrating.
• Mansfield has a team that made the blocking decisions on their CEN.
• Recent changes CEN within the last month.
• Teachers can download YouTube using Tubezilla.
• Need to teach students and teachers how to deal with inappropriate sites.
• Searching with the keyword "image" with the topic desired will give images without having to use Google Images.

• Jane created a new wikispace, cttechintegration.wikispaces.com with hyperlinks to Successful Practices projects.
• She embedded all the files as objects so when you download the project it will contain everything.

• October 30, 3:30-5, you are invited to a demonstration of InspireData, data analysis software for grades 4-12.
• We'll view some database examples to explore features.
• One time consortium discount for our districts for Inspiration Software, Inc. products.

• Jane is creating a page with the cool web sites and tools we discussed. Please keep adding as you find new sites.
• You can purchase your own wiki server (through wikispaces) so you can turn off internal mail and control other features.